Method Actors on SOMA Stage: Students of the Alinsky
Organizing Method
Attempting to put Alinsky’s model of social action into play, the Central
City Multi-Service Center hired people representing all constituencies
in the North and South of Market areas and developed an elaborate census,
conducted in 1968, to determine the exact population and its
needs. From it came the first mobile urban health van in the U.S.,
the pocket parks that now dot the intensely urban parts of the city,
the first National Transsexual Counseling Unit in the U.S., a community
center in South Park, the first police liaison officer to a gay community,
and a landmark study of street youth and drug addiction that produced
a Peabody-winning PBS documentary “Drugs in the Tenderloin” (1967).
Ground Zero: Yerba Buena Saga Rages On
Most pertinent, through the Central City Legal Assistance Foundation,
a coalition of small business owners who had successfully resisted the
wrecking ball in the late 50s and old labor organizers living in residential
hotels in the Yerba Buena Project area filed the first successful injunction
filed against the SFRA and HUD, once again bringing the wrecking ball
to a standstill. This ad-hoc community group dubbed itself TOOR, Tenants
and Owners Opposed to Redevelopment. Specifically, their hard-won injunction
asked the disturbing question of why the Redevelopment and Relocation
Agencies were one and the same in San Francisco, and insisted that the
issues of relocation—economic and residential displacement—needed to
be fully resolved before any kind of redevelopment could occur.
Next Wave: Founders of Folsom Fair Pick Up the Community
Preservation Baton
This resistance of late 1969 and early 1970 was carried on into the
’70s and gave birth to various neighborhood-based organizations. Prominent
among these groups was TODCO, a non-profit community housing developer
located at 4th and Howard streets. TODCO was born directly
out of TOOR’s activism, being incorporated in 1971 as an arm of TOOR
dedicated to building new affordable senior housing—or remodeling existing
units. TOOR’s lawsuit against the SFRA was eventually settled in 1974,
with the city guaranteeing 1,500 low-cost relocation rooms, plus allocating
four lots in the Yerba Buena project area on which TODCO was to build
housing. (That vision has been realized today, with TODCO now moving
out into other areas of South of Market to provide and/or build affordable
housing to the existing residents). After a round of further, unsuccessful
lawsuits filed by environmental groups, a revised Yerba Buena Plan,
incorporating the new TODCO units, was issued in 1978 and was the blueprint
for the park and convention and museum complex that exists today. It
broke ground in 1980.
It was in this environment in 1980 that Kathleen Connell and Michael
Valerio came to work under the umbrella of the activist organizations
in place, and began their collaborative community-organization work
that was to lead to “Megahood,” the first Folsom Street Fair in 1984.
While unaware of their queer predecessors in the Central City Anti-Poverty
Target Area, Connell and Valerio were acutely aware of the same issues
that had been taken up by that earlier generation, and of the potentials
and pitfalls involved in attempting to bring together such diverse communities
into a forceful and self-empowering coalition. In many respects, their
work carried on, even if unknown to them at the time, the spirit of
activists who had roughly 10 years earlier broken ground.
In 1979, Michael Valerio was hired by TODCO to develop low-income senior
housing. Of Philipino/ Spanish heritage and raised in Pacifica, Michael
was an out and active young gay man of the Castro, with an enormous
creative drive and a freshly minted career in real estate.
One month prior, Kathleen Connell, an out gay woman from the San Francisco
Bay Area, had established a special project of then Governor Jerry Brown’s
at TODCO, with a focus on food delivery and community business development.
Connell had extensive organizing and communications experience prior
to TODCO in human rights, women’s issues and the political economics
of development, and had done stints with the United Farmworkers office
in the fields of California, Mexico and Arizona. She had done her undergraduate
work at Berkeley a few years before meeting Michael.
Connell and Valerio came into contact with each other through the South
of Market Alliance, a SOMA neighborhood-based advocacy group contesting
SFRA and city Board of Supervisors decisions for the area. Connell and
Valerio cemented their friendship, their shared gay perspectives and
their working partnership in their interaction with the SOMA Alliance
in 1980-81. Each offered the other a complementary view of the world,
and personally came to see that they both longed to interject their
“gay selves” into their work. The turmoil of South of Market would soon
give them impetus to take an action, and express the joy of gay liberation
that they lived in, in San Francisco, after the work day was done. What
they did not know at that time was that the dark tsunami of AIDS was
lurking just offshore, at the cusp of their lives, and was about to
come crashing down upon the entire community.
Diverse LGBT “Entertainment” Zone
The South of Market gay scene was never more robust than in these salad
days before AIDS. The long-established leather haunts were hives of
parties, fetes, steamy back rooms and sexual freedom. The women’s community
was migrating South of Market to 1190 Folsom to frequent the newly opened
and posh Baybrick Inn—a women’s dance club, live performance venue,
hotel and restaurant complex run by Lauren Hewitt, a former actress
who brought flare and taste to the women’s scene. The Baybrick was a
magnet for thousands of bay area women; lines formed around the block
every weekend as “women and their friends” waited to get in the very
popular bar. Dick Collier’s Trocadero, one of the first huge discos,
was just down the street, featuring Sylvester to droves of ecstatic
partiers on the weekends. Several bath houses inhaled many a man on
the prowl on Friday night, not disgorging that individual until Sunday
night or Monday at dawn. Whatever their preference or gender, the Stonewall
generation was coming into its own not only in the Castro, but migrating
to South of Market, as the so-called Golden Age of the Gay Mecca raved
on—culturally, politically and personally for the eager refugees from
homophobic America.
By day, a quick walk down Castro might result in an invitation to join
a mass rally against Anita Bryant, the Florida orange juice right-wing
spokesmodel, and by night anything could happen, and often did, all
over town.
